About the history of AIDS in America.

[Lord Wortherington]

I was in San Francisco recently visiting friends. One evening we walked to the top of Bernal Heights park and were taking in the view of the cityscape at night. My friend pointed out the San Francisco General Hospital and told me that is where "patient zero" was first identified and that the person was a researcher at the hospital who was doing AIDS research. I think I have conveyed what my friend told me correctly, does anybody have any more information about this or can anybody confirm this? The story sent a chill down my spine, the city was lit up and there was barely any traffic on the roads, off in the distance... the sounds of the city.

[yardwork]

1. How could they have been doing AIDS research if there hadn't been a patient yet?

The story as you told it makes no sense.

[Lord Wortherington]

4. It absolutely makes since.

Since people would have been around with an unidentified disease, which would then have to be identified, they may have not known it was AIDS, yet, but "patient zero" I would assume could be identified years down the road as they do the history of a particular virus or disease.

[yardwork]

8. No, "patient zero" is the term given to the very first patient.

Researchers were studying the mystery disease, which they dubbed AIDS, before the HIV virus was discovered. But none of those cases were "patient zero."

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. That still doesn't make any sense.

People didn't start studying GRID then AIDS until people were already stick and dying from it.

Sounds like your friend's on a conspiracy theory tangent, the kind that goes on about how AIDS came from government laboratories.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. Your friends' full of beans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_zero

[Warpy]

3. That hypothesis was later disproven

because a teenager in NC has since been proven to have died of AIDS in 1969.

Because the immune collapse had happened in a young, healthy teenage male with no known cause, samples of his tissues and blood were kept frozen. When a test for HIV was developed, his tissues were tested and they were positive for the virus.

HIV is a very old illness, IMO. Virologists studying the mutation rate of this virus have determined the species jump initially happened sometime between 1910 and 1930, most likely during the butchery of bush meat from infected green monkeys.

It waited for planes, trains and automobiles to spread.

[Deep13]

5. I know Reagan would not even acknowledge the problem.

He was of the God's-punishment-for-sin point of view. C. Everret Coup, the Surgeon General and former right-to-life activist, essentially went around Reagan and launched an AIDS prevention media campaign on his own. The centerpiece of the campaign was the latex condom. Coup put public health first and his private views second.

[yardwork]

9. Koop. He turned out to be a much better surgeon general than expected.

Much better than Reagan expected, too!

[cali]

6. I don't think so. Here's what wiki has to say:

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, there was a lot of controversy about a so-called Patient Zero, who was the basis of a complex transmission scenario compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the US. This epidemiological study showed how 'Patient Zero' had given HIV to multiple partners, who then in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus to locations all over the world (Auerbach et al., 1984). In all, at least 40 of the 248 people diagnosed with AIDS by April 1982 were thought to have had sex either with him or with someone who had.

A journalist, Randy Shilts, subsequently wrote about Patient Zero—based on Darrow's findings—in his 1987 book And The Band Played On, which identified Patient Zero as a gay Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas (February 20, 1953—March 30, 1984 <1>). For several years, Dugas was vilified as a "mass spreader" of HIV and the original source of the HIV epidemic among gay men. However, four years after the publication of Shilts's article, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting that its methods were flawed and claiming that Shilts had misrepresented the study's conclusions.

A 2007 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Michael Worobey and Dr. Arthur Pitchenik claimed that, based on the results of genetic analysis, HIV probably moved from Africa to Haiti and then entered the United States around 1969. <1>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero

and here's another piece:

At the CDC researchers had been continuing to investigate the cause of AIDS through a study of the sexual contacts of homosexual men in Los Angeles and New York. They identified a man as the link between a number of different cases and they named him "patient O" for "Out of California".68 The research appeared to confirm that AIDS was a transmittable disease, and the co-operation of "patient O" contributed to the study.69

However a problem arose when other people read the scientific paper.

"I called this guy Patient O... But my colleagues read it as Patient Zero."

- Darrow for Newsweek -70

And so in March 1984 the myth of Patient Zero began.71 See 1987 for more information about Patient Zero.

http://www.avert.org/his81_86.htm

[IndianaJones]

7. is your friend Matthew Modine? nt.